Sadhbh Warren

At one Australian company I worked for, we needed to buy the perfect gift for a big client. The Managing Director had a great idea - we would buy them a six-pack of Swan lager, which the client loved. The only issues were: we were in Sydney; the beer was in Perth, 4000 miles away (same distance as London to Tehran for the sake of comparison); and the visitor was German, and now safely at home with his bratwurst and weißbier. Feral Sunset, from Flickr/ Anthony Georgeff We couldn't find a drop of Swan in Sydney and due to various licensing laws you can't just post alcohol from WA to New South Wales. We had to bribe a member of our staff who was in Perth - on holidays - to take a cab from Perth airport and buy some, and bring it in their clicking hand-luggage on the plane. So, between the cost of the beer (plus another six pack for the Director, who was using this as an excuse to get some himself), the taxi fares, a small bribe for the buyer (which was also a...

I posted   last year about the expletive-laden bedtime book that leaked as a pirated PDF and sold more than 100,000 copies in pre-orders, “ Go the F**k to Sleep “. The brainchild of  novelist and toddler parent, Adam Mansbach, this book contrasts sweet nursery rhymes about animals and heart-warming illustrations by Ricardo Cortes with the exhausted profanity of a parent who is clearly hitting the end of their tether trying to establish a sleeping routine. One mate said she found the book very funny but she’d like to see a version for the parents of teenage kids who, far from sleeping too little, can’t be hauled out of bed in the mornings without the aid of a forklift and twenty bottles of Coke. “Parents of teenagers who are still up and wandering around the kitchen at 1am, and then like dead logs when you attempt to drag them out of bed for school in the morning, would certainly love to see this book redone for teenagers.” So I took a shot at it. For tho...

Darling Harbour - nice, but not for swimming. (WikiCommons: Adam.J.W.C) So, today's adventure involved P (aka He Who Married Me Last Month) and I pulling some poor (probably) drunk and very distressed girl out of Darling Harbour's waters about 30m away from 2 buses full of people who sat and watched. We were at Star City Wharf sitting on a tour bus, one of two packed with people, and saw a girl walk across the road and jump neatly into the water. We couldn't see into the water but we could see all the surrounding wharves. Some nearby people (friends?) came over and pointed and laughed, and a jogger stopped, said something and ran on. No one threw in the nearby life buoy. We figured she was okay and doing something stupid and would be out soon. Her friends(?) stayed there, pointing and giggling, but it became apparent they were really, really out of it - falling down drunk, probably. A couple of minutes later she hadn't emerged and we decided to take a lo...

For those of you here via my Fat Chick's Guide to the Couch to 5k  here's a bit of an update on my running - the program did get me there without exploding my prostate or patella, and I can particularly recommend making sure you have good shoes and cooling clothes to back you up if you decide to go for it. I'm normally doing 5kms jogs/runs these days. Weddings! Now being blamed for my lack of fitness! Well, I say normally but what with Sydney's inclement winter (yes, 10C or 50F can feel cold, stop laughing) and my recent wedding I haven't been hitting the road as often or as hard as normal. The spirit is willing but the flesh, frankly, has got used to drinking hot chocolate on the couch when the rain starts. Which means I have picked a pretty bad time to be emboldened by the lack of exploding body parts and to enter the 9km Sydney Running Festival Bridge Run in mid September. This will be a bit of a challenge. I have never broken the 7km ...

When it comes to beer, I wrote the book. Well, a chapter anyway - I recently wrote the 8 page chapter on Sydney’s best beers, numerous breweries and what to do when you're not drinking beer for the Ultimate Beer Guide (Aus and NZ). When I was a little girl I wanted to be a writer and write books about ponies. When I was in college I wanted to be a writer and drink beer. Now I am (technically) an adult I still want to be a writer. Beer and ponies are optional but encouraged. I’ve accepted writing involves a lot less ponies and beer and a lot more work than I had originally thought, but occasionally you get a dream assignment. If you flick to page 42 of the Ultimate Beer Guide , you’ll find my guide to brewing in Sydney. It took two months and far too many hangovers to research and write and I am looking forward to seeing if the ATO will accept receipts from pubs as tax-deductible. When I was writing this piece, I found 5 craft breweries I never knew about within 30 minutes ...

This piece on office friendships, workplace bullying and how to cope when good  working relationships go bad was an interesting piece to cover. I was only able to include a few of the stories I was told but - from the amount of responses I received to one simple tweet asking for people with experience of office bullying - it certainly appears this is an issue that many people deal with on a day to day basis.  You can find the full issue of the magazine on their website where you can see the full piece, or email me if you would like to see more.  A study by the Workplace Bullying Institute found that 35% of people have either been or are being intimidated in their workplace. Sophie* found this out the hard way when she was promoted over her former friend, Jenny. “Jenny became not just my enemy but an outright bully. She complained that it wasn't fair because I'd gotten all these lucky breaks and opportunities. She couldn’t see that the harder I had worked t...

“Hey, did you finish that book I gave you?” “…um. No, not yet.” “That’s okay, I won’t spoil the ending for you. Are you enjoying it?” “…um. No. Not really. I don’t think I’ll finish it.” Ouch. It’s a trivial thing but I always feel bad when someone doesn’t like a book I gave them, especially if I thought that they were a dead-cert to click with it. First comes denial – “Are you sure you are reading the right book?” That’s usually followed by the urge to defend the book (“Have you read the bit with the zombie space monkey butlers? Like, really read it? Twice?”), followed by the sheepish realisation that I got my friend’s reading taste completely wrong and probably wasted several hours of their time and they’d like me to stop going on about it now, please. I’ll admit to a touch of neurosis on this one but I think most people would agree that when you recommend something, you really hope that people will like it and it can be disappointing when they don’t. So cho...